ספר דברים

‎(Compare Shabbat 87) In the event, G’d agreed with Moses, ‎i.e. approved of his initiative after the event. One of the three ‎things was that he added an additional day for the people to ‎prepare themselves mentally, (spiritually) for the Revelation and ‎the receiving of the Torah. The second was that he smashed the ‎first set of the Tablets containing the Ten Commandments. He ‎applied logic when doing this, reasoning that if a Jew who has not ‎been circumcised is forbidden to partake of the Passover due to ‎his status, and this is only one commandment, how much less do ‎they deserve the entire Torah, having just been guilty of idolatry? ‎This logic is flawed, as in the case of the Passover, the Torah ‎forbids participation in a ritual which provides the participant ‎with pleasure, i.e. the eating of the lamb, something not ‎applicable to most other commandments of the Torah. We have a ‎general rule that the commandments of the Torah have not been ‎given to us for whatever physical pleasure performance of it ‎would yield.‎‎Tossaphot on that folio query how the sages could ‎describe this decision of Moses as being made by himself when he ‎had used the Torah as the yardstick by which he had arrived at ‎this decision? They answer that since Moses’ logic in that ‎instance was flawed, the decision must be viewed as his and not as ‎inspired by his study of the Torah. The third example of Moses ‎making a high-handed decision without consulting G’d is his ‎separation from his wife, the subject for which Miriam criticized ‎him in Numbers 12,1-2. On that occasion also, according to the ‎Talmud, he used logic, a valid tool of interpreting the Torah, ‎saying that if the people who heard G’d speak for only a few ‎minutes had to separate from their wives for three days prior to ‎that, he, to whom G’d spoke almost on a daily basis, [prior ‎to the sin of the spies, Ed.] surely had to separate from ‎his wife permanently.‎Concerning that logic the Talmud points out that seeing that ‎G’d had told Moses to send the Israelites home to their wives, ‎whereas at the same time He commanded him to remain at the ‎site of the revelation, surely in light of this Moses’ decision could ‎not be construed as being arrived at on his own? Here too, the ‎Talmud says that whereas Moses considered his logic as ‎unassailable and therefore based on the Torah, in fact his logic ‎can be challenged.‎Moses was in a category by himself, having stated that during ‎‎40 days in the celestial regions (on top of Mt. Sinai) he had ‎neither eaten bread nor had drunk water. (Deut. 9,9) His ‎nourishment had consisted of the ‎זיו השכינה‎, “enjoying the ‎splendour of the Divine Presence.” Due to his extreme humility, ‎Moses presumed that the entire Jewish nation was entitled to a ‎similar experience, i.e. the ability to satisfy the body’s ‎requirements through infusions of spirituality from a celestial ‎source. This is what he built his logic (‎קל וחומר‎) on when drawing ‎conclusions from the three day period of the abstaining from ‎marital intercourse during the preparations for the Revelation at ‎Mount Sinai, as well as from the laws concerning who may ‎partake of the Passover. He reasoned that the Torah most ‎certainly did not address nitwits, but a people on the highest ‎spiritual level, else how could they be able to hear G’d speak to ‎them directly on that occasion. He considered it as certain that at ‎that time everything the people did was only for the loftiest ‎motives, i.e. ‎לשם שמים‎, why else would they keep their distance ‎from their spouses? He erred by comparing the whole people to ‎himself, so that the logic which formed the premise of his ‎decision was flawed. In other words, his decisions were not based ‎on correct interpretations of precedents in the Torah, so that the ‎sages in the Talmud were correct in describing his three decisions ‎as “homegrown.”‎